Under the cover of COVID-19, Christmas came early this year for the friends of Doug Ford.
The owners and directors of long-term-care (LTC) home corporations (including Mike Harris) are off the hook for liability for their well-documented shoddy operations during COVID-19.
Ford’s friend and funder Charles McVety will, somewhat magically, likely get his Christian College turned into a university.
His developer buddies will like Ford’s new rules for Conservation Authorities whose authority is now much diminished.
And what did Santa Doug do to make all this happen?
He stuffed the stockings hung by the chimney with care.
Every one of these treats was snuck into omnibus bills designed to deal with the pandemic.
Of course, it may have helped that the LTC association lobbied the government hard in the months leading up to the passage of the law. And no doubt lobbyists’ donations to Ford’s party got the attention of MPPs. And that many of those donors used to work for the Tories.
The legislation for rebranding McVety’s Canadian Christian College as an accredited university was tucked into the stocking labelled Bill 213, an omnibus bill dealing with urgent pandemic matters. Schedule 2 of the Bill simply declares, much like a papal bull, that the college can now grant Bachelor-level degrees.
Finally (for now, at least) is legislation which practically eviscerates the ability of the Province’s conservation authorities (CAs) to regulate development to protect the environment. Schedule 6 does the damage and it’s buried in omnibus Bill 229, an act to implement the Conservatives’ 2020 pandemic budget.
The government spin is that it simply increases transparency of what CAs are up to.
It does that, but it also expands the authority of the Minister to override decisions made by a CA. It narrows the authority and scope of what CAs can do to protect the environment. And it restricts the ability of CAs to act on things like flood control and protecting clean water sources.
Bill 229 (the Protect, Support and Recover from COVID-19 Act – I love the titles of these things) also has a bonus stocking stuffer.
This one is for the logging industry.
As the Canadian Environmental Law Association notes, schedule 8 exempts them from prohibitions against destroying the habitat of endangered species
hat covers logging operations on nearly two-thirds of the Province.
Mr Grinch didn’t steal Christmas.
He gave it to his friends.
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